SENSEI: A Search for Diurnal Modulation in sub-GeV Dark Matter Scattering

Abstract

Dark matter particles with sufficiently large interactions with ordinary matter can scatter in the Earth's atmosphere and crust before reaching an underground detector. This Earth-shielding effect can induce a directional dependence in the dark matter flux, leading to a sidereal daily modulation in the signal rate. We perform a search for such a modulation using data from the SENSEI experiment, targeting MeV-scale dark matter. We achieve an order-of-magnitude improvement in sensitivity over previous direct-detection bounds for dark-matter masses below 1 MeV, assuming the Standard Halo Model with a Maxwell--Boltzmann velocity distribution, and constrain the amplitude of a general daily modulation signal to be below 6.8 electrons per gram per day.

6 pages, 3, figures, + Supplemental Materials (4 pages, 4 figures) + References

References in corpus (14)

• The Local Dark Matter Density
• Single-electron and single-photon sensitivity with a silicon Skipper CCD
• Semiconductor Probes of Light Dark Matter
• Making dark matter out of light: freeze-in from plasma effects
• SENSEI: First Direct-Detection Results on sub-GeV Dark Matter from SENSEI at SNOLAB
• Ionization Yield in Silicon for eV-Scale Electron-Recoil Processes
• DaMaSCUS: The Impact of Underground Scatterings on Direct Detection of Light Dark Matter
• SENSEI: Characterization of Single-Electron Events Using a Skipper-CCD
• Probing Benchmark Models of Hidden-Sector Dark Matter with DAMIC-M
• Mapping Dark Matter in the Milky Way using Normalizing Flows and Gaia DR3
• Search for Light Dark Matter in Low-Energy Ionization Signals from XENONnT
• SENSEI at SNOLAB: Single-Electron Event Rate and Implications for Dark Matter
• Search for Daily Modulation of MeV Dark Matter Signals with DAMIC-M
• Low-Energy Backgrounds in Solid-State Phonon and Charge Detectors